I know you guys are working hard to make seller experience better. However i want to point out how difficult it is to be part of the Amazon small and light program. As far as i understand, the program is intended to make shipping and handling cheaper for FBA sellers who are selling small items. The enrollment process is one of the worst i have seen.

I have existing items that need to be enrolled, and i have new items that have to be enrolled. When the enrollment portal was released, i was so excited that there is a way to enroll stuff. However, the UX was horrible because i have to submit csv file with tab delimiter. Why even release a portal if the goal is to give people a XLS file to generate a CSV file? That does not makes sense.

Secondly, my submission keeps on failing with the message of which my item is commingled. What does that even mean? I contacted your support staff and your support staffs didn’t really know much about this process and they had to escalate to really figure out what’s wrong. But the suggested resolution to the problem is less than stellar:

“The listing also needs to be uncommingleable to be part of the Small and Light program. This is why you are getting the error message “This offer is commingled. You may create a new seller-fulfilled offer and submit it for enrollment.”.”

Basically, the problem here is that i have created the listing and enrolled them into FBA without enrolling the listing into light and small program. The system will not accept this and the only way to go about it is to create a brand new listing and list that into small and light program first before I turn on FBA.

I have a question for you. Shouldn’t light and small program be a property on the listing? Why should the seller be creating a new listing in order to be enrolled into the small and light program?

This is very poor experience and unnecessarily complicated for such a easy configuration. I really just expect that to be a button or check box in the listing that controls that.

TV Shows like Shark Tank, and success stories from the Silicon Valley had reaffirmed our beliefs in American capitalism. Our entrepreneurial spirit is at all time high, and boy, it’s time to start that website, phone app, and online store to bring your idea to life. I did something similar a year and a half ago. Today, Wizardry Foundry is one of the top makers of premium card storage for Magic: the Gathering. I am going to share the story of Wizardry Foundry in this post, and will dive into some specific topics in eCommerce business over the next few weeks as well.

April, 2014, I was leisurely organizing my Magic collection with the off-the-shelf cardboard tube boxes. Even though I had been collecting Magic since I was 12, my collection didn’t really start to expand in size and value until recently (I got a good paying job, and I could afford to buy more cards). It dawned on me that it was absolutely ridiculous for me to sort and stow away my thousand-dollars collection in those silly cardboard tubes. Just as all entrepreneurs would say, “There must be a better way”, I pulled out my Moleskin notebook and sketched the first Grimoire concept – A box that makes collectors feel like a wizard.

The business opportunity might seem silly to outsiders, but it made perfect sense to a unique niche market like Magic: the Gathering. I did a lot of thinking about this business, and here were some of the notes:

There is really only one player in the game storage – Ultra Pro, and it has been around for 20+ years, and it is currently making millions of dollars making plastic boxes.

There has been a huge gap in the market – there are storage for decks but there has never been a commercially viable, non-custom made large size deck box that can store up to 1,000 cards

The game format cube or battle box was gaining popularity and those game required decks that had more than 100 cards.

Those observation suggests that high end gaming box is a niche vanity market. Traditional business thinking would make any sense because there was no price to vanity – simply ask the question “why would someone spend $2,000 dollar a year on pieces of paper?”. The race was on to bring an artisan box to the market. The strategy was dead simple to me:

To make a box to hold 1,000 cards – there was not a single box that holds that many cards.

To design a family of them with different artwork so people would buy more of them.

To produce the deck box at reasonable cost so we could price it perfectly between $25 bucks (the time master series box) and $120 bucks (cube vault).

End of April, 2014, I setup my social media accounts, and boy, was I ready to bring this to the world.

“What is the name for the product?”, Yasu asked.

“Hrmmm, I didn’t think that far ahead.”, I said.

Yasu, my trusted friend and marketing expert, was just about to make our first announcement on Facebook, and we didn’t even have the name for my deck box.

“It looks like spellbook.”, I said.

“Ok… hrmm… call it Grimoire?”, Yasu asked

There! That was how the brand Grimoire was born. We had no inventory in hand, not even a factory selected yet, and we made our first post about the Grimoire Deck Box. The post was in the aether of the net for two days, and there was nothing. Yasu turned on the paid traffic ads and we started to receive massive number of hits. We made our first $10,000 dollars in less than 30 days and it was such a morale boost.

As usual, Murphy’s law got us, and our first production lot was delayed due to some quality issue with the lot. We had booked over $15,000 dollars worth of orders at that point. Some customers were patient with us but some were simply angry toward us. What could a software geek like me who knew nothing about eCommerce operation and manufacturing do at this point? I hired up and doubled down on my investment – I got extra customer service staff to man the email inquiries. I was sending weekly update to make sure my customers and I were connected. 30 days later, the first Grimoire was shipped and everyone was happy.

By then, I was already designing for the second edition design, and we started accept pre-order right when we started to ship the Alpha Edition. I believe my fans would treat the Grimoire as a collectible product, and the introduction of the Beta Edition was simply a test of my theory.

Let’s just say that the test was a success (the order volume was not even close to the Alpha Edition), and around 20% of the customer came back and bought from us again. What could be better than repeat businesses. From that point, we shipped the Beta Edition around Oct, and started to accept pre-orders for the 3rd Edition in Nov. We did a holiday sales on pre-order item. That was something….

Feb 2015, we shipped the 3rd Edition, and I had decided to challenge my competition. I noticed there were a few players creating deck boxes that hold 2-3 decks. The goal was to create a box which players could store everything they need for a game outing, a grab-and-go deck box. I decided to create the Grimoire Pro Tour line of product. It was a battle tested design – I was going to a lot of tournament so I pretty much built a box for my own tournament use. This time, I also did our pre-order a little differently. I created a whole new Kickstarter Campaign for this product!

The campaign raised over $10,000 in 30 days, and it was the most popular Magic deck box campaign till that day. I gotten praises and hate throughout the campaign, some of which were definitely constructive but some of them were just plain mean (learn to have a thick skin folks). The Kickstarter campaign was the launch pad for 2 more Pro Tour releases (Beta and 3rd Edition). Right after that, I also released a brand green themed product to create more options for my fans.

Wizardry Foundry was a fun experiment that made me over $100k so far. I could safely conclude that it was successful because the nature of the vanity niche market made it very straight forward to enter. While the market was straight forward to enter, it was also risky because there was no other customer segments other than magic player for me to pivot. For that, I was very grateful for the support from my gaming community.

Do you have a product you want to launch? What is the nature of the market? Is it general or Niche?

Get business check list

I got on the Peace dive boat with Eco Dive Center, and embarked on this fun dive adventure this weekend over at Channel Island. We gathered around the dock at roughly 6:30am to prepare our gear for the trip.

The boat ride there was pretty rough due to the big swell on the open sea. People were getting sick, vomit, praying that we would get to the dive site soon. The condition was not exactly perfect, and the captain took an extra hour to get to our first dive site.

Geared up, I dove into the ice cold ocean water. The shock of the cold water did not deter me. My dive buddy Keith and I were very set on finding the baby seals, and little did we know, a baby seal showed up and interacted with us the whole dive. Check out our video.

If you are an amazon FBA seller, you might wonder if LTL shipment might be cheaper than the lightweight carriers like UPS. I have recently faced the same dilemma. I experimented on both and lived (sort of) to have a tale to tell.

The Problem

I have about 250 units to be shipped to FBA so I am ready for the holiday rush. I have about 1 pallet worth of goods (around 400lbs).

The Decision

Moving these units via UPS will cost me the same as moving them via LTL carrier. I opted for LTL carrier in this case.

The Horror

Everything was packed and ready to be shipped on Nov 2nd and the carrier didn’t really pick up the two lots until Nov 6th. My batch is split into two shipments. One of the shipment arrived and was received by AMZ in a timely manner which supported the holiday rush. Then the horror started.

One of the other shipments was just gone. No one really knew where it was and it surfaces up finally on 12/14. It took a good 40 days for one of my lots to show up at the AMZ warehouse, and because of the holiday, the lot is probably won’t get processed until 12/19. This is a bit disappointing because I need a reliable shipping partner for my business to be successful.

WTF?

Honestly, it was a huge mistakes for me to risk 50% of my holiday inventory on an untested logistics vendor. I think the next logical question is when will using LTL carrier makes sense for small to mid size sellers? From a cost perspective, if you only have 1 pallet, it really does not make sense to use LTL because your pallet will be split into 2 – you might actually pay more for the shipment. Here is a break down of my back-of-the-napkin calculation.

1 Pallet – Bad idea
2 Pallets – You probably will break even with UPS depending on where you are shipping
4 Pallets – You will save a little bit more money
8 Pallets – LTL for sure…

It is 4am in the morning. You have gotten the sample for your first production run. Everything is going smoothly, and you are about to launch your first online store to start selling your product. What marketplace or online store software should you use? There are so many of them out there — Shopify, Amazon, Etsy, etc. I will share my experience and discuss the difference between Etsy and Amazon.

List a Product

To start, you have to list a product into the store before you can start selling. Since Amazon might be a more mature / older platform, they have massive amount of fields to describe almost any products. Some of which can be very redundant as well. Etsy seems to be way more simple and you can list a product with just title, description, price and photo.

Things on Amazon listing process that really stuck out like a sore thumb:

You have to have UPC number for your product in order to be listed

Update takes about 30–45 minutes to propagate

Your listing will show that you are “one of the vendor” who sells the product while you might be the “only” one selling the product

Checkout and Payment

One might argue that Amazon has a better checkout experience because it has stored almost everyone’s credit card information on there. While Etsy definitely does not have that setup for their shoppers, I don’t think this is necessarily a deal breaker for Etsy. Pre-storing credit card information is great for frequent and repeat purchase. If you are buying a lot of things over and over from the same source, it really makes sense if the store can store your information for you. Etsy tends to attract new vendors with unique products that warrant a single purchase, the ability to store credit card number is not exactly needed. Also, most products are unique and tend to be on the expensive side in Etsy, not having the credit number stored should be the last road block for your customer’s buying decision.

Built in Advertising

Both Amazon and Etsy have built-in advertising support to help you sell more product. Etsy advertising product is CPM based so you have to bid on a per impression basis. On the other hand, Amazon offer a CPC based advertising product where you only pay for clicks to your product. Both products have their own pros and cons, and it’s very hard to tell whether one is better than the other without experimentation. Based on my experience at Wizardry Foundry, I have way better luck with Amazon CPC. That could have been because my product is in a special niche and it’s not really that competitive.

If you have to ask me to pick my favorite eCommerce platform, I am going to have to pick Amazon. While Etsy is a solid platform for selling craft goods, Amazon has way bigger reach and the CPC is pretty effective. I saw way more sales coming from Amazon than from Etsy. I highly recommend you try all the channel until you have found the right one for your product! You never know which one will be more optimized for your vertical.